The Woman Left Behind by Linda Howard
Instead she took her bag upstairs to her spacious walk-in closet and unpacked it right then instead of putting the chore off until later. The afternoon was fading away and she was tired from traveling; she wanted a shower first, then she would take her laundry downstairs. Waiting was both difficult and amusing, knowing the bugs were picking up the sounds of her moving around her house.
She showered, changed into her nightgown and a robe, gave her distinctive silver hair a good brushing, moisturized her skin. Then she took her dirty laundry downstairs and dumped it in the hamper for Helen to deal with; as she left the laundry room she noticed the note on the floor and her heart thumped. Going over to the door she ostensibly checked the lock, though she knew good and well it was secured, and while she was there glanced down to see the words “Bait taken. One.”
So the lure had been a success. “One” designated which GO-Team had been sent to cover Graeme Burger’s visit to Paris. She and Devan had devised a simple code, listing the teams in alphabetical order by the team leader’s last name, and “Butcher” was number one. She was vaguely disappointed; she’d have preferred that Tyler Gordon’s team be the one because that had originally been the team led by Morgan Yancy, the man who had killed Dexter. That would have been poetic justice, but in the end which team didn’t matter. All she and Devan needed to do was slowly lure them into a trap. Nothing would hurt MacNamara more, and bait him into the trap she had planned at the end, than the destruction of one of his beloved teams.
The missions weren’t always boring.
Over the next three months, Jina learned to treasure the ones that were. Likewise, the missions seldom went as smoothly as her first one. There were hiccups in timing, unforeseen circumstances that interrupted whatever they were doing—such as an auto accident happening in front of them and bringing traffic to a halt—minor injuries in training or on the job that interfered with the fluidity of the team, or a glitch in communication. The one time they were in the field with no cell service, the equipment malfunctioned. Tweety worked perfectly; she could hear the guys perfectly. The glitch came with her own communication back to the guys, with breaks in their ability to hear what she was saying. They were lucky in that nothing bad happened because they couldn’t hear her, and the whole point of her being on the team was her being able to alert the guys to any approaching trouble. If her throat mic didn’t work, then there was no point to her even being there.
Just after Christmas—which they got to spend with their families, hallelujah, but they had to leave the day after—they spent almost three solid weeks in Colombia establishing pattern of life on a bad actor. They had cell service, so the throat mics weren’t needed. From Colombia they went back to Paris and she damn near froze to death, partly because she’d just spent those three weeks in a warm clime and her system had no time to adjust. Then it snowed twice, nothing more than a dusting each time, but still—insult, meet injury. From Paris they went to Egypt, spent a grand total of eighteen hours there, then on to the Philippines to fetch a defector. That was the first time Jina got to use Tweety for his designated job, with no cell service out in the boonies, watching the guys’ backs for them—and her throat mic wouldn’t work half the time.
By the time they got home from that particular mission—having hitched a ride in the belly of a cargo plane, which was not comfortable—they’d crossed so many time zones going back and forth that she had no idea what day it was. She assumed it was still January, but she wouldn’t swear to it. She was grouchy, sleepy, hungry, had a massive headache, and she was completely pissed off about the throat mic. She grabbed her stuff and stomped off in the direction where she thought she’d parked her car maybe a month ago, though maybe not. No matter that she needed a shower, a cup of coffee, twenty-four hours of sleep, and food, in any order whatsoever because she was beyond caring. No, she did care. She’d last had a shower . . . she wasn’t certain. It had been in Paris, though—whenever they’d been there. Didn’t matter. She was taking the faulty throat mic to headquarters to start raising hell, and some shit was going to start rolling uphill until whoever was in charge of R&D got this POS fixed.
She couldn’t find her car. There was snow on the ground, covering the vehicles. And she was brain-dead. She stomped up and down a couple of aisles, because she had a vague memory of parking close to the fence . . . maybe. Maybe that had been the first Paris trip. None of the snow-covered lumps looked familiar. Snow crunched under her sneaks, spilled over the tops and down into her shoes. Yeah, she’d paid attention on that first mission and this time wore something other than boots, and now look.
There were sounds coming from different aisles of the parking lot as the guys found their vehicles and started them. No one moved, though, because they all had to deal with the snow on their windshields. Several of them got out and began scraping the snow off. Yeah, she had a snow-scraper in her car, too, a foreign piece of equipment to someone from south Georgia, but she’d learned her first winter in D.C. that the gadget was necessary. All she had to do was find her car and she could scrape with the best of them.
Or maybe she’d just stand right here in the middle of the parking lot and sleep, and worry about her car tomorrow.
A truck door slammed, and she heard footsteps crunching toward her. She turned and saw Levi, big and imposing in his heavy jacket, a black knit cap covering his hair. “Something wrong?” he asked, coming to a stop beside her.
She had spent the long weeks since Thanksgiving ignoring him as much as possible, which wasn’t as much as she’d have liked because he was the team leader and she had to pay attention to him. But she tried not to look at him, to keep her head down and acknowledge him only when he directly addressed her, which didn’t happen that often because he was doing his part to ignore her, too. Damn him. He was better at this ignoring crap than she was, and every night she went to sleep resenting him for ever letting her know he wanted her. Her equilibrium hadn’t been the same since.
“I can’t find my car,” she muttered.
He rubbed his eyes. He didn’t look as tired as she felt, adding to her resentment, but he wasn’t brimming with energy, either. “I’ll take you home,” he said, and turned away, the matter settled as far as he was concerned.
Take her home? She was tired, not crazy. “No,” she said bluntly. “I need my car.”
He turned back and eyed her. “I don’t think you’re okay to drive,” he finally said.
“If the guys are okay, I’m okay. Besides, I need to take this piece of shit throat mic to headquarters and ram it down someone’s throat.”
His lips twitched. He looked up at the sky, then back at her. Finally he pulled out his phone and looked at it. His lips twitched again, and she got the feeling he was trying not to smile. If he smiled, she’d punch him in the nose. “Uh-huh. What day do you think this is?”
She knew a trap when she saw one, but she couldn’t pull out her own phone to check without proving that she didn’t know. She thought she’d kept track of the days, despite all the time-zone hopping. “Friday afternoon.” She looked at the sky, too. “Latish.” Maybe that was wrong, because something didn’t look right.
“How about Sunday morning, earlyish.”
Oh. That was what didn’t look right; the sun was in the wrong place. She shrugged. “I’m just a day and a half off. Not bad.”
“Not too bad. But I’ll take the piece of shit mic and shove it up someone’s ass, not you.”
“I said down someone’s throat, not up his ass.”
“Whatever. I’ll be the one who does it.”
“It’s my mic.”
“It’s my team.”
She wanted to argue but there was no refuting that point, so she pressed her lips together. He was the boss. A complaint coming from him would carry a lot more weight. She dug in her equipment bag and pulled out the offending item, thrust it at him. “Have at it.”
He took the throat mic and shoved it in his pocket. Deprived of the prospect of unloading
An idea sluggishly emerged from the morass that was her brain. Her car keys were secured in an outside pocket of her equipment bag. She fumbled for the pocket, pulled out her keys, and hit the button for the alarm. Obediently, from somewhere close by, a horn started blowing. She turned in a circle, trying to pinpoint the sound.
“Over here!” Boom bellowed from where he was busy scraping his windshield, pointing to the left.
She waved. “Thanks!” She stopped the alarm and started down the row.
“Wait.”
Reluctantly she turned back. “What?”
“I was serious. You’re barely functioning. I’ll take you home.”
She considered that for a whole second. “Would you take any of the other guys home?”
He didn’t like that. She saw it in the way his eyes narrowed. But he didn’t lie. “No.”
“Then you aren’t taking me home.”
He dug in his pocket, came out with a candy bar. “Then take this.”
It was a Baby Ruth, chocolate and peanuts, a triple whammy of sugar, protein, and a little bit of caffeine. Oh, thank God. She grabbed it from him, not caring at all that he was the one to provide it, and tore it open as enthusiastically as a tiger on a fresh kill. From now on she’d carry her own supply of candy bars; she learned something new on every mission. “Thanks.”
Without acknowledging her thanks he turned back to his truck and climbed in. Jina trudged through the snow to her car, still gnawing on the Baby Ruth. As she passed a couple of the guys she saw that they were chewing on something, too, so evidently this was something they did to give them a last burst of needed energy.
She wondered if she’d taken Levi’s only bar of candy.
If so . . . tough.
Because they’d just come home from such a long, convoluted job, they didn’t have to show up at the training site again until Wednesday, and she needed every hour of the recovery time. When she got home she fell facedown on the couch and slept four hours, then woke befuddled and annoyed. Not knowing what else to do, she changed to sweats and went for a run. Then she ate some peanut butter crackers, showered, and went back to bed. The fitful, out-of-sync sleep continued. She was awake at midnight, doing laundry. After another nap, she forced herself to stay awake all day Monday, going for a couple of short runs, cleaning out the refrigerator, buying groceries. Her brain felt as if it was made of fog. But she stayed awake until a reasonable hour, then slept twelve hours and woke feeling much better, except for the memory of a vivid dream about Levi.
She didn’t want to relive those moments in the field when he’d been kissing her as if he could inhale her, but her subconscious decreed otherwise. He’d given her his candy bar—the bastard. Just when she got a mental wall against him somewhat built, he’d do something like that, or like going to the tattoo parlor to protect her, and BAM! all her carefully placed mind-blocks came crashing down. Her dream wasn’t exactly like what had actually happened; in her dream, the entire team stood around watching, and making angry comments.
She woke feeling depressed; how else could the guys be expected to react? Even her subconscious agreed, and hammered the lesson home.
She remained depressed all day Tuesday; even a long run that exhausted her didn’t produce enough endorphins to counteract her angry longing. She wanted Levi, not just physically—though that was intense—but the everyday things that cemented life. She wanted to eat breakfast with him, argue with him, bitch at him about leaving the lid up, snuggle against his back at night. Never before had she cared about a man enough to think about a life together, but with Levi . . . yes. She wanted that.
Why couldn’t she have felt this way about Donnelly? He was a nice guy. Going through life with him would be easy, and comfortable, with shared laughter. On the other hand, nothing about Levi struck her as easy. He was hard, somewhat grim, uncompromising. He lived a dangerous life, regularly risking injury and death, and he did it without hesitation.
Hard on that thought came the realization that she shared that life, that her part in the missions was mostly in the background but not without risk. She was that extra layer of protection for him and the other guys. What if something happened to him, to any of them, on her watch? A chill ran through her. She should have realized this before, and on a superficial level she had, but until this moment she hadn’t felt the weight of responsibility for their lives. The heavy mantle of it settled on her shoulders, sank into her pores, and forever changed how she regarded her job.
Levi could die if she screwed up.
No matter how angry she got at him, no matter how much the situation frustrated her, that home truth drove her hard when Wednesday rolled around and they returned to their training routine. After such a long mission they were slated to be home for a healthy stretch, but they never slacked up with the training. For her part she ran harder, longer, pushing herself more than she ever had before, and she’d pushed herself plenty. She put in long hours with Tweety’s program, practicing and then practicing some more, honing her skills.
Whoever’s ass Levi had crawled up about her malfunctioning throat mic came through with a replacement that was guaranteed to work. The problem had evidently been a bad laryngeal sensor. She put the new throat mic through the mill, making the guys participate despite their bellyaching, on the grounds that it was their butts on the line. The new mic performed the way it was supposed to, with clear and reliable audio into their headsets. Finally satisfied, she gave it a thumbs-up.
“About time,” Levi said drily, when he found out. “Now we can go active again.”
She was startled enough to look directly at him, something she tried not to do because the impact of his intense gaze was enough to make her falter. He was standing closer than she liked, close enough that she was caught in his gravitational pull; she had to fight to keep from leaning closer to him. “What?”
“All the equipment has to be okayed before we go.”
Her mouth fell open. “You mean—we were waiting on me?”
“Yep.” One side of his mouth quirked. “Not that we minded the down time, but I was beginning to think you were going to design and manufacture your own.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“You’re in charge of Tweety. Until you say it’s ready to go, it doesn’t go. If there had been an emergency we’d have gone without you, but things worked out.”
“Go without me?” she repeated, horrified by the idea, though logically she knew that if a team member got hurt the rest of the team would deploy without him if necessary.
“We got along without you before,” he pointed out, his tone even and a little cool, the way it always got when he wanted to put some distance between her and the rest of the team. It stung, and she tried never to let him see that it stung. Did he think that if he managed to push her out, she’d still want to get involved with him? She’d be mad as hell, because she didn’t like to fail at anything. She wouldn’t let herself quit, and she’d fought like hell to be good enough, so the only way to get her off the team would be to somehow force her to fail.
The only other option she could see was if she asked to be transferred to another team, and she thought that idea would go over like a lead balloon. Teamwork was essential, and the drone operators had been assigned to the team MacNamara had thought each one would work best with. Moreover, after the long months she’d spent with her team, she didn’t want to go through it all again with another bunch. She’d tested out at the top of the trainees, start to finish; no one else could protect her guys as well as she could. Damn if she’d transfer. Damn if she’d quit.
No matter how she looked at it, that left them with nowhere to go. One of them would have to bend, and it didn’t look as if that was going to happen.
“That was before,” she said just as coolly, and left it at that.
There had been a big powwow over whether or not the drones and the laptops, with their highly classified software, should stay with the operators or be safely stowed in some secure place and checked out only as needed. When a GO-Team was activated it usually had to go, top speed, and wading through protocol to get the drone and laptop would slow things down. On the other hand, Jina hadn’t been wild about the idea of having something that valuable in her safekeeping, and neither had any of the other operators. Places were broken into all the time, and laptops stolen. In the immortal words of Forrest Gump, shit happened.
The compromise was that a GO-Team supervisor, one per each shift, was assigned laptop/drone duty. Whatever team was activated, the supervisor had to get the designated laptop and drone and get it to their point of egress. Getting the correct laptop and drone was of the utmost importance, because the drone was programmed to recognize the team members of the unit it had been assigned to. She couldn’t specifically alert one team member if she didn’t know who it was; she would have to alert all, wasting time and effort as they all reacted to a threat that applied to only one of them. So—individualized drone recognition.
She did, however, have her headset and radio, and the weapon she’d been instructed to carry if they were traveling by a means that allowed the team to go armed. This time the firearm had to go with her, meaning they weren’t traveling commercial. She preferred commercial over hitching a ride on whatever military or cargo plane they could wrangle, but so far commercial was the exception rather than the rule.